Fig. 53.—Stone Flakes:—a, Palæolithic; b, Modern Australia; c, Ancient Denmark.
Fig. 54.—Later Stone Age (neolithic) implements. a, stone celt or hatchet; b, flint spear-head; c, scraper; d, arrow-heads; e, flint flake-knives; f, core from which flint-flakes taken off; g, flint-awl; h, flint saw; i, stone hammer-head.
Fig. 55.—Earlier Stone Age (palæolithic) flint picks or hatchets.
Fig. 56.—Stone Axes, &c. a, polished stone celt (England); b, pebble ground to edge and mounted in twig handle (modern Botocudo, Brazil); c, celt fixed in wooden club (Ireland); d, stone axe bored for handle (England); e, stone adze (modern Polynesia).
The oldest known tribes of men have left in the drift gravels of the quaternary or mammoth-period not only rough flakes like [Fig. 53] a, but the stone implements already mentioned in the first chapter, of which the drawing is here repeated in [Fig. 55]. Chipped to an edge all round, they may have served with the pointed end as picks and the broad end as hatchets. It is not clear whether any of them were fixed in handles, but there are specimens found which have only one end chipped to a point, but the other end of the flint left smooth, so that they were evidently grasped in the hand to hack with. There is nothing to show that these men of the old drift-period ever ground a stone implement to an edge. Thus their stone implements were far inferior to the neatly-shaped and sharp-edged ground celts of the later Stone Age, [Fig. 54] a, [Fig. 56] a. The word celt used for the various chisel-like instruments of rude and ancient tribes is a convenient term, taken from Latin celtis, a chisel, in the Vulgate translation of Job xix. 24, “celte sculpantur in silice;” but it has been thought that “graven with a chisel (celte) in the rock” is only a copyist’s blunder for “graven surely (certe) in the rock;” and if so, then celtis and celt are curious fictitious words. It may be worth while to mention that the name of the implements called celts has nothing to do with the name of the people called Celts or Kelts. A stone celt only requires a handle to make it into a hatchet. This was done very simply by the forest Indians of Brazil, who would pick up a suitable water-worn pebble, rub one end down to an edge, and bind it in a twig, [Fig. 56] b. Another rude way of mounting a celt was to stick it into a club, so as to form a woodman’s or warrior’s axe such as c, which shows one dug out of a bog in Ireland. The most advanced method was to drill a hole through the stone blade to take the handle as in d. When the stone blade is fixed with the edge across, the tool becomes a carpenter’s adze, as e, which is the instrument used by the canoe-building Polynesians.